Dear Dollar Stretcher,
They say rent should be a third of your salary, or something like that.
How much should be allocated to credit card debt if you made the
mistake of getting into debt?  If I paid each credit card a little bit, I’d
still owe about $400 a month.  What should my income be to pay that much
each month but still not be in trouble? For instance, if I only earned
$1,200 a month, I couldn’t be expected to pay rent, food, etc., AND
credit cards. But if I was making $100,000 a year, $400 a month wouldn’t
seem like much. Is there a way to calculate this?
Linda

Georgia’s ban on payday lending survived a legal challenge Monday when the state Supreme Court upheld the conviction of two South Georgia lenders who tried to skirt the law.The unanimous court decision says that high-interest lenders cannot avoid criminal prosecution in Georgia by disguising a payday loan as another type of transaction.

“You can’t have a scheme or a sham and evade the law,” said former Gov. Roy Barnes, interpreting the court decision. The ex-governor’s law firm is representing consumers in a group of class-action lawsuits challenging the payday lending industry.

Published on: 05/17/07 Carmen Johnson leans against the doorway in her living room and lets out a deep sigh. Like a mother who has just given birth, she’s exhausted, yet proud of her beautiful new “baby.”

The bundle of joy is actually a 4,300-square-foot historic home in historic Druid Hills. Johnson bought it nine months ago, gutted it down to the studs and orchestrated a major renovation to enlarge and modernize the house to her standards.

place, the window treatments are up, Johnson’s extensive art collection hugs the walls and there’s not a moving box in sight. Her new addition is picture perfect and ready to receive visitors.

The second time was the charm for Mayor Daley’s plan to use enhanced developer incentives to solve Chicago’s affordable housing crisis: It sailed through the City Council on Monday, one week before nine new aldermen bankrolled by organized labor are sworn in.The mayor’s ordinance would broaden the city’s 10 percent affordable housing mandate to include all types of city land transactions, planned developments and zoning changes that increase density.

Units would have to be affordable to families that earn no more than $75,000, the annual median income for a family of four in the Chicago metropolitan area. That’s roughly $183,000 for a two-bedroom home.